Arcadia

One of my standard assignments, when I was teaching in the School of the Art Institute’s Arts Administration program, was to ask students to visit cultural institutions, and rather than review the exhibitions and performances, to critique the character of the audiences and the design and architectural messages of the cultural spaces themselves.
One student asked if she could visit a Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant as her cultural destination. I was a little taken aback at first, but realizing that cultural institutions are increasingly falling back on edutainment as a way of keeping their audiences numbers up, her idea of visiting a site that featured unadulterated “tainment” without pretensions of “edu” seemed pure genius. That was years ago, but her choice of venue has always stuck in my mind, Last week, having never having been to a Chuck-E-Cheese’s in my life, I finally determined to go check one out.
I googled “Chuck E. Cheese’s locations Chicago” and got 23 results, though only two are actually in the city itself. I wrote down the nearest address in my notoriously indecipherable planning calendar, and prepared for my trip to the pizza parlor / gaming room / animatronics theater / light show / jungle gym (“Where a kid can be a kid”). I turned to my trusty, untrustworthy Wikipedia, and did a little research on Chuck E. Cheese’s history.
What I found surprised me. Founded in 1977, with sites in the United States, Canada, and, of all places, Guatemala, the chain functions as an unintentional archive of various attempts to connect to kids through pizza and electronics over the last 30 years.
Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre, designed to introduce video games to younger audiences within a family environment, and one of the first restaurants to marry robotic entertainment and food service, was launched by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, the creator of “Pong”. Pizza Time Theatre went through various permutations as a business, involving legal battles with “Showbiz Pizza Place, Inc.” involving suits and counter-suits over issues of concept origin and ownership of animatronics design. This also involved competition between mascots, the primary contenders being Chuck E. Cheese (the “E.” is for “Entertainment”), originally conceived of as a rat but promoted as a mouse, and Billy Bob Brockali, a singing robot bear. A bankruptcy and a corporate takeover eventually resulted in a restructuring of both restaurant chains through a process called “Concept Unification”: Billy Bob still appears in a few Chuck E. Cheese’s, but in the world of animatronics pizza restaurants, it’s not a bear market or even a bull market. It’s a mouse market. There is an amazing video on You Tube of Showbiz Pizza Place robots being dismantled for retirement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXCrVNEwGxM&eurl=http://www.platypuscomix...
According to Wikipedia, “there are a few restaurants still using the Showbiz Pizza Place name and animation. All are located outside the United States, and have no connection to the original company. Known locations are in Lebanon, Dubai, UAE, and Kuwait.”
One of Chuck E. Cheese’s main attractions in the United States (and Canada and Guatemala) remains its electronic games. Before the appearance of hand held gaming devices, Chuck E. Cheese’s was one of the primary places for younger citizens to access video games, thereby insuring the chain a fond place in the childhood memory of many an aging Gen-Xer. The location I visited on Fullerton Avenue still features Space Invaders (Silver Anniversary Edition), the sight of which triggered a little bloom of nostalgia in the heart of this aging Baby Boomer.
The coin of the Chuck E. Cheese’s realm is a company issued token, eagerly collected by obsessive fans of exonumia (the study of coin-like objects). The company is now experimenting with a currency of refillable cards, like the ones they use at Kinko’s, introducing yet another technology to the chain’s operations.
Which brings us back to the original assignment that prompted my Chuck E. Cheese’s outing in the first place. What did I learn about cultural spaces from my visit to this clanging restaurant? The chain is essentially an arcade, made family friendly by the presence of pizza, and by a series of security measures (called Kid Check) designed to prevent the abduction of children.
Arcades have traditionally been showcases for new art forms and new technologies. Film began its commercial life in arcades, as did animatronics – witness the mechanical gypsy fortuneteller. Arcades have also traditionally been spaces for crossing class boundaries, as well as for covert glances at sexuality (the peep show). Chuck E. Cheese’s appropriates the buzz of the arcade while skirting its transgressions. This domestication of the arcade roughly parallels the retooling of grassroots regional professional wrestling into corporate family entertainment.
Arcade games spread beyond the world of arcades, even before the appearance of hand held devices and Wii. Here, again, is wikipedia: “In addition to restaurants and video arcades, arcade games are also found in bowling alleys, college campuses, dormitories, laundromats, movie theatres, supermarkets, shopping malls, airports, truck stops, bar/pubs, hotels, and even bakeries. In short, arcade games are popular in places open to the public where people are likely to be waiting on something.” At Chuck E. Cheese’s, designed to keep children entertained so moms and dads can relax, parents are waiting on their children to grow up and move out on their own.
But the final word on arcades needs to be given over to Walter Benjamin, the ground-breaking German essayist and cultural philosopher, whose last, great, uncompleted work, the Arcades Project, was an assemblage of quotes and meditations on the meaning of the phenomenon of arcades, in which interior and exterior, the private and the public, the utopian and the commercial are inextricably inter-cut:
"…’an arcade is a city, indeed a world, in miniature’... the manner in which they are fitted out displays Art in the service of the salesman…”

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
www.capeweb.org